Liebling, at the Top of His Game

THE SWEET SCIENCE AND OTHER WRITINGS

The Sweet Science, The Earl of Louisiana, The Jollity Building, Between Meals, The Press

By A.J. Liebling

Library of America. 1,057 pp. $40

Whenever two or three grizzled readers gather together at some McSorley's-like saloon and the evening grows long, the old-timers will eventually lean back in their chairs and take up yet again that vexing question: Who is the greatest New Yorker writer of them all?

Setting aside the eminent poets and fiction writers who have graced its pages, the New Yorker magazine has been the home to many of the best reporters and essayists ever to sit down at an Underwood. Some of my own favorites include S.J. Perelman, Janet Flanner (Genet), James Thurber, E.B. White, Kenneth Tynan and John McPhee. But virtually any of the magazine's regulars of the past 80 years can boast of his or her champions.

In the end, though, the two final contenders for the heavyweight title are nearly always the same: Joseph Mitchell (1908-1996) and A.J. Liebling (1904-1963). During the 1930s, '40s and '50s, both regularly profiled people who viewed life as a sad carnival, though often a noisy and colorful one: grifters and cracker-barrel politicians, snake-oil salesmen and religious fanatics, every sort of scapegrace, eccentric and urban dreamer. We read about them and, recognizing ourselves, murmur "Mon semblable, mon frère!" -- my twin, my brother.

Appropriately, Mitchell and Liebling, like two Arthurian paladins, were themselves great friends, going back to their earliest days as journalists for the New York World-Telegram. They are fundamentally different writers, though. Mitchell's prose tends toward a Virgilian wistfulness, ever aware of the tears in things and the constant changing of the seasons and the end to which we all must come. (The omnibus "Up in the Old Hotel" collects nearly all his best work.) Liebling, by contrast, is more often bright and snappy, with a taste for learned analogy and a greater range of subject matter. While Mitchell often comes across as a somewhat lonely, modern-day Montaigne, Liebling is more the gregarious newspaperman of genius, a connoisseur of good food, beautiful women and late-night drinking, as well as an ardent habitue of the boxing ring and the track.

In the end, though, we now read Liebling -- as we do Mitchell -- for the sentences. These reveal a sharp eye and the assumption that readers relish a slightly arch verbal chutzpah. In "The Sweet Science," a collection of articles about boxing that Sports Illustrated once named the best sports book of all time, Liebling opens by cheekily referring to "the laying-on of hands." A few pages later he then calls the heavyweight Archie Moore "a late-maturing artist, like Laurence Sterne and Stendhal." His account of a title bout between Moore and Rocky Marciano is a tour de force:

"Wrapped in a heavy blue bathrobe and with a blue monk's cowl pulled over his head, [Marciano] climbed the steps to the ring with the cumbrous agility of a medieval executioner ascending the scaffold." Moore, by contrast, "looked like an old Japanese print I have of a 'Shogun Engaged in Strategic Contemplation in the Midst of War.' " Just before the bell rings to start the fight, Liebling observes "Mr. Moore's eyebrows rising like storm clouds over the Sea of Azov," while Marciano "resembled a Great Dane who has heard the word 'bone.' "

In the ring Moore stands nicely, "the picture of a powerful, decisive intellect unfettered by preconceptions." He eventually knocks Marciano to the floor with a solid right, only to see his opponent stay down for all of two seconds. Liebling speculates about what might have gone through the surprised Moore's head: "He may have felt, for the moment, like Don Giovanni when the Commendatore's statue grabbed him -- startled because he thought he had killed the guy already -- or like Ahab when he saw the Whale take down Fedallah, harpoons and all." I wonder if any sportswriter today could get away with those last two allusions.

In "The Earl of Louisiana," Liebling takes on Louisiana politics, describing the campaign shenanigans as Earl Long -- brother of the assassinated Huey Long -- tries to win back his former seat as governor. Early on, Liebling watches a newsreel about "Uncle Earl": "In the beginning, I could see the Governor was as confident as Oedipus Tyrranus before he got the bad news." Later on, "the Governor's voice was sad, like the voice of a man recounting the death of Agamemnon." After commenting on speculation that Long might be physically or mentally ill -- the governor had recently been hospitalized for a nervous breakdown -- Liebling adds that he himself "inclined to the theory that if a man knows enough to go to the races, he needs no doctor."

At one point, Liebling pauses in his election coverage to visit the bar of a blind old boxer named Pete Herman, "the best infighter I have ever seen in my life." He explains, "As I age, I grow more punctilious about my aesthetic debts; in Paris a few years ago I met Arthur Waley and thanked him for translating the Tale of Genji."

Liebling obviously loves rhetorical exuberance. In "Yea Verily," he showcases Col. John R. Stingo, a racing tout and the master of a polysyllabic vocabulary (this already lengthy profile was later expanded into a book called "The Honest Rainmaker"). The colonel notes, for instance, that his associate Spindle Jack was "a follower of chance who acquired that sobriquet during years of peregrination with carnivals." Col. Stingo also explains that his own longevity results from observing three dicta: "I will not let guileful women move in on me. . . . I decline all responsibility. And, above all, I avoid all heckling work." Because the colonel once wrote for the Enquirer, later the National Enquirer, Liebling indulges himself by quoting some of his favorite headlines, such as "Thirteen-Year-Old Roger Was a Friendly Boy Who Trusted Everyone -- So He was Sacrificed to Make a Love Potion."

The last section of this Library of America volume is devoted to Liebling's essays about the press. The man loves newspapers, but has no illusions about them: "The function of the press in society is to inform, but its role is to make money." Back in the 1950s Liebling noticed that more and more cities were becoming one-newspaper towns, with a resulting loss of the competitiveness needed for good journalism. What would he say now? Liebling -- for more reasons than one -- thou should'st be living at this hour!

Dirda -- mdirda@gmail.com-- writes Thursdays in Style.